Their stock price could hit zero for all I care

OK, I didn't want to spoil the Jeannie Zelasko thread with this, because it wasn't the place for it. But the recent spate of cancer diagnoses I've been hearing about -- and the father of my son's teammate on his tournament soccer team just got diagnosed with a brain tumor -- is pissing me off.

The anger is directed toward Big Pharma, which is wasting its unlimited resources -- both financial and brain-powered -- on bullshit like growing prostates, social anxiety disorder and other relatively trivial maladies. Meanwhile, the Big C keeps ravaging lives and families.

I'm sure these are uncomfortable to those with them and apologies to anyone with these afflictions, but this is so seriously fucked up that I actually clapped the other day when I heard that Pfizer's stock price was going in the toilet. I was hoping the rest of the sorry lot (yes, I mean you Merck, Bristol Myers Squibb and all the rest) was taking it in the stock price short-and-curlies as well.

She's the most finicky and discerning person when it comes to conspiracy theories, but Mrs. Birdscribe has a conspiracy theory that I'm starting to subscribe to. She said that they could cure cancer tomorrow, but the entire medical establishment has no financial interest in doing so; that if they did so, it would upset non-profits like the American Cancer Society, as well as oncologists, radiologists and others who make damn good livings treating cancer.

The more I mull this over, the more it makes a sick sort of sense to me. And as someone who lost both his mother and stepmother to cancer in a 3 1/2-year span as a young boy, the more it pisses me off.

Especially when I hear news like the above.

Rant over. Thanks for indulging me.

 

Good rant. Can't disagree with your basic points. I lost my mom to cancer when I was 12, and while advances have been made, treatment hasn't advanced enough.

I take a little different tack than you, Birdscribe, I think drug companies invent diseases. Restless leg disorder? Are you fucking kidding me?

I would love to go to some remote tribe somewhere in the world and do a study to see if they suffer the same "ailments" we see advertised to us in our media. Is some cargo cultist in Micronesia complaining of restless leg disorder? Or does he blame the cargo gods? Or does he just think he's fidgety?

You could do this historically too. Did Leif Ericsson sit there on his Viking ship and say to himself, "God damn, my acid reflux is kicking my Viking ass today!" Did Sir Alfred Tennyson ever wax poetic about his panic disorder?

 

I agree with ya Bubs, but just to throw it out there, it's Restless Leg Syndrome.

 

Syndrome. Disorder. Either way, no one in Borneo complains about it.

 

Reminds me of one of my favorite Chris Rock bits: "There ain't no such thing as <i>lactose intolerance</i> in Rwanda!!!

 

My mother has that. And she lives just east of Borneo, in Minneapolis.

 

Well done, Birdscribe.

I find what seems to be people not doing nearly enough about cancer equally frustrating. Most of us on this board - edging entirely too close to all of us - know someone who has been affected by this awful, awful disease.

It hit my maternal grandmother 10 years before I was born. It's altered or ended the lives of too many other friends and people I know through family.

I'll end my post with this simple message:

"Life is a journey, filled with so many obstacles, some easy and some very difficult. No matter what obstacle you are facing, never give up just 'Keep Pounding.'"

Sam Mills

 

Putting it plainly cancer sucks.
Melanoma killed my father almost 7 years ago.
Earlier this year my mother had surgery and a round of chemo to beat colon cancer.

So I'm going to the dermatologist every year for a melanoma check and in a few years I get the joy of doing colonoscopies since I now have a family history of colon cancer.

 

There are plenty of drug companies doing all sorts of stupid things, but for the last 10 years I've been a stockholder and a big supporter of a California company called Genentech (ticker symbol DNA). It's doing all sorts of wonderful things for several kinds of cancers.

We're on the verge of breakthroughs for all kinds of diseases. We're only beginning to understand genetics and stem cells. I don't know that any of this will happen in my lifetime, but for our children's children, I think medicine won't be anything like we know it today.

 

Fanboy looser!

 

If the drug companies had us by the balls a couple generations back, would we have (nearly) cured polio? Put a major dent in TB?

 

Congress needs to revamp the advertising policies for the drug companies.
Ban 'em from advertising on TV and radio and put the millions they spend on marketing into research.